XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web

Post by badmintonbaseba » Fri, Jun 27, 2025, 8:37 AM UTC

  1. Even though there are newer XSLT standards, XSLT 1.0 is still dominant. It is quite limited and weird compared to the newer standards.

  2. Resolving performance problems of XSLT templates is hell. XSLT is a Turing-complete functional-style language, with performance very much abstracted away. There are XSLT templates that worked fine for most documents, but then one document came in with a ~100 row table and it blew up. Turns out that the template that processed the table is O(N^2) or worse, without any obvious way to optimize it (it might even have an XPath on each row that itself is O(N) or worse). I don't exactly know how it manifested, but as I recall the document was processed by XSLT for more than 7 minutes.

Post by JimDabell » Fri, Jun 27, 2025, 8:40 AM UTC

jbverschoor wrote: post #64

jonwinstanley wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, JQuery was the thing that fixed the browser inconsistencies. If you used JQuery for everything, your code worked in all the browsers. This was maybe 2008?

Probably 2005. 2002, I was using “JSRS”, and returning http 204/no content, which causes the browser to NOT refresh/load the page. Just for small interactive things, like a start/pause button for scheduled tasks. The progress bar etc. But yeah, in my opinion we lost about 15 years of proper progress. The network is the computer came true The SUN/JEE model is great. It’s just that monopolies stifle progress and better…

Post by rwmj » Fri, Jun 27, 2025, 8:41 AM UTC

maxloh wrote: post #63

CiaranMcNulty wrote: post #19

It's sad how the bloat of '00s enterprise XML made the tech seem outdated and drove everyone to 'cleaner' JSON, because things like XSLT and XPath were very mature and solved a lot of the problems we still struggle with in other formats. I'm probably guilty of some of the bad practice: I have fond memories of (ab)using XSLT includes back in the day with PHP stream wrappers to have stuff like ` ` This may be out-of-da…

However, XML is actually a worse format to transfer over the internet. It's bloated and consumes more bandwidth.

Post by catmanjan » Fri, Jun 27, 2025, 8:45 AM UTC

p0w3n3d wrote: post #51

em-bee wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at the current technology we could cope with server generated old-school web pages because they would have low footprint, work faster and require less memory. unless you have a high latency internet connection: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44326816

however when you have a high latency connection, the "thick client" json-filled webapp will only have its advantages if the most of the business logic happens on the browser. I.e. Google Docs - great and much better than it used to be in 2000s design style. Application that searches the apartments to rent? Not really I would say. -- edit -- by the way in 2005 I programmed using very funny PHP framework PRADO that was…

Post by Tade0 » Fri, Jun 27, 2025, 8:52 AM UTC

catmanjan wrote: post #87

p0w3n3d wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

however when you have a high latency connection, the "thick client" json-filled webapp will only have its advantages if the most of the business logic happens on the browser. I.e. Google Docs - great and much better than it used to be in 2000s design style. Application that searches the apartments to rent? Not really I would say. -- edit -- by the way in 2005 I programmed using very funny PHP framework PRADO that was…

Lol you'd hate to see what blazor is doing then